It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump Into Office

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The author describes the survival-of-the-funniest trial that memes underwent on 4chan, but fails to acknowledge what we know well today: the ‘best’ content doesn’t emerge from free upvoting on the internet. Beran understands the grotesqueries of 4chan as a kind of modern monument to disconsolate male heartbreak.

As Marcuse put it, after “true needs” such as “nourishment, clothing, [and] lodging at the attainable level of culture” were met, the industrial engines that generated these goods didn’t simply shutter their factories and declare their jobs done. The further Beran gets from a screen (he laments “the screen” without getting into why it’s so much worse than “the page” or “the stage” or “the epic poem”) the less he knows what he’s talking about. We can feel pity for the people sucked into the 4chan hate machine, though we still can't justify their actions. You might not personally care about Donald Trump, the rise of white supremacy and how Charlottesville happened but if, like me, you are interested in how the world has got to where it is now and what might need to be done to prevent things shifting even further, this book is a good place to try and gain some understanding of it all.Hell, if you want to blame the internet for the many weaknesses of today’s left, tumblr wouldn’t be where I’d look- I’d look at Twitter, which Beran does little with, mostly treats as a neutral medium. It’s just the part of the world that, for a long time, everyone was pretending not to see, creating that vague Wrongness that drove me to 4chan in the first place. His understanding of left history seems limited to whatever Mark Fisher, Zizek, or anyone else published in Jacobin or Current Affairs has said.

Reading Dale Beran’s chronicle of 4chan, the anonymous imageboard where some of the internet’s worst scandals have been fomented, feels like scrolling through the forum itself . And what I get is that I can't get it because the whole thing has been gestating in some parallel internet world that I have never engaged in. I’m probably making this sound worse than it is, but I think that’s because the good parts and the bad parts stand in the starkest contrast in this book.And so it went down the line: Anonymous protesters, all following Rule 1, trying to conceal 4chan from me, and obscure the source of the joke, just like a raid into a chat room, each hiding their motivations behind a mirrored chamber of repeated memes. It would also be news to Marxists and New Left activists to learn that it was 21st century campus leftists (whom he had earlier criticized for being liberal rather than radical) who first "broke with" such unifying 18th century (ahem, liberal) enlightenment ideals. Even the hippies’ boundless transcendence is chopped up and sold by the hour as meditative yoga sessions. One more reason we need healthcare for all—including mental healthcare—so we do not foster more lone-wolf gunmen, more women-stalking murderers, more angst-ridden men-children, more Nazi-saluting gun-toting gym-rats.